BILL CLINTON:"Their campaign pollster said, 'We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.' Now that is true. I couldn't have said it better myself -- I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad."

ASSOCIATED PRESS FACT-CHECKER:"Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,' Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were 'legally accurate' but also allowed that he 'misled people, including even my wife.'"

for one year we could select president based on which convention kicks more a$$.

Greatest convention speech by a first lady (or almost anyone else at that point) on night one.

The single greatest political speech I have ever seen on night 2 (plus Warren knocking it out of the park).

Night three has a guy that's not to bad at speeches himself.

The GOP is being completely outclassed. Our folks are more polished, talk about more substance, and have done it all in a more entertaining way.

If this is a sign for how the debates and the rest of the campaign will go, it would be very, very good.

And again, man did the Big Dog take the country to school last night. Unbelievable. I agree with someone I watched who said they should print the best lines on note cards and send them to all of the party's surrogates to repeat for the next month. He laid out the entire case for this election in a 45 minute class.

... worked out so much better for us, had isolationist Republican -- you know, those guys who campaigned in 1940 on the premise that Hitler's Germany coundn't be beaten -- been in charge of the country at the time of Pearl Harbor.

How do you justify denying the "will of the people" to have their choice representing them?

I can understand mechanisms to remove Representatives The People find unsatisfactory. But, to draw an arbitrary line on the length of time The People's choice can hold office smacks of political, bureaucratic, pique.....not Democracy.

Number Two (and I say this as delicately as I possibly can): I would crawl on my knees naked through four miles of crushed glass just to listen, on a bad radio, to a debate between Bill Clinton and the zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan.

I will start with a couple of paragraphs. Anyone who wants to keep it going, please do:

My fellow Americans, I am here tonight to tell you that the money is angry. The money is irate, brimming with rage. It's angry that normal people with low credit scores have spent too much of it, that the useless mooching government has thrown it away on old people, the sick, and research studies about whether cow farts increase global warming. The money is angry because not yet all of it has been handed over to and hoarded by a small group of people with gorgeous bad taste in yachts and candelabras and diamond earrings as big as Dumbo's wings -- people who could give that money a far more comfortable and secure life than any other demographic group could.

Much like the Great White Shark, we know almost nothing about how or why the money reproduces in the manner it does, or whether it also requires romantic music and schnapps to loosen up. We do know, however, that new money comes into existence all the time. If it did not, there would be no market for things like extra chrome upgrades on Cadillacs or solid gold Kleenex cozies or having your children monogrammed. One intrepid 1% parent, I have been told, of dual Saudi citizenship, even gave to their child as a birthday present, 75 years of parking meter revenue from a mid-sized American city, which the parent had purchased at pennies on the dollar from a local municipality desperate to plug a small hole in their short-term political gonads.

But I think we can all agree, monogramming children is wrong, and I believe my party can reach consensus on this. And solid gold Kleenex cozies are just plain tacky. What is gold anyway? Or the gold standard for an economy? Have you ever tried to survive on gold? It doesn't sautee very well. And it's hard to make into shelter, or clothes. But I must admit it looks damn enticing sprinkled on a twice-baked potato.

Talking Points Memo reports that the "disillusioned Obama supporter" in the Republicans' latest attack ad is actually Bettina Inclan, the Director of Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee.

Come on, you can admit it: you see a look-what-the-GOP-did comment, and off you go to find something the Dems did.

Seriously, what is your point? Is it to make the GOP seem less bad? Is it to send both parties to the time-out chair?

If all it gets out of you is a shrug, and you don't care, then don't care, but this endless tit-for-tat stuff just doesn't seem to be in service to a whole lot that means anything.

Other than a version of "I know you are but what am I?"

It reminds me of when my kids were little and when one would come running to tell me her sister had been mean, the accused would feel obligated to tell me that she was only mean because her sister had been mean to her first!

Since I notice you didn't take Donald to task for posting about (hee hee) the fake Republican-turned-Obama supporter, here's another one for you:

The Democratic National Convention on Wednesday featured three speakers billed as "former employees of companies controlled by Bain Capital."

They each told compelling stories about jobs lost, allegedly because of the actions of Bain under Romney's leadership.

But it turns out one of those employees never actually worked for a company controlled by Bain Capital.

David Foster was supposedly one of those former employees on the convention schedule. He told the story about 750 steelworkers who lost their jobs when the Bain-controlled company GST steel filed for bankruptcy in the early 1990s.

SNIP

But Foster, according to a former spokesman for GST Steel, never actually worked for the company.

"David Foster was never an employee of GST Steel's Kansas City plant. He was employed by the United Steelworkers of America as their regional union director to represent GST Steel, but was not employed at our facility," according to BC Huselton, who was head of HR at GST.

Instead, Foster was a union organizer, who negotiated for workers that did work for the company.

Foster explained in his remarks that he was an organizer during his dealings with GST Steel. But it is not clear from the remarks that he never worked for a company controlled by Bain.

And while he didn't say specifically for a Bain company, the DNC sure did.

It's really too bad these are the kinds of things are what passes for political campaigning and discourse, because goodness knows, we don't need to hear about things like, an actual plan for the economy.

Equivalent to a GOP staffer plant in a nationally running ad on television.

Credible.

Need I remind you that there has been, at best, two honest words about Obama that have come out of Republican's mouths for the past 4 years? Those two words being "Barack Obama"?

This isn't a qualitative game - who here believes the Dems are pure as driven snow. But when it really does come to quantitative comparisons, the GOP takes the cake. But your comments don't reflect that. And if your comments are intended to keep Democrats honest in some way, it would be more effective if your comparisons were.

"Not that it's not a good idea to give students loans, it certainly is a good idea to give them loans. But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany -- how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope."

How in the world do phuquing morons like these ever get elected in the first place?

my (current) Representative! I never voted for him, but he is definitely way past his "sell by" date now. Another grandpa who needs to have his keys taken away.
Thanks be to The Flying Spaghetti Monster that we have been redistricted out of his Congressional District, and he will never be my Representative again.

... that he sounded totally off his rocker, because his campaign just issued the following statement of apology:

"While explaining my position on an important Constitutional issue I regrettably used an extreme example as a comparison that was ill-advised and inappropriate. I should never use something as horrific as the Holocaust to make a political point, and I deeply apologize to anyone I may have offended."

We're still awaiting clarification from the campaign regarding whatever point it was, exactly, that Bartlett was trying to make in the first place.

his campaign workers. (Almost, but not quite- they did choose to work for him, after all.)
It must be sort of like: "Grandpa's on the porch, waving his cane and threatening the neighborhood children again! Somebody go bring him inside and put him to bed!"

It's an unlimited sovereign debt purchase scheme for those countries which submit to giving the ECB a vote on their fiscal policies. Here's a good rundown.

Conditionality. Strict and effective conditionality is attached to ECB purchases of sovereign debt. What this means is: No country gets to have their bonds purchased unless they submit to outside oversight on fiscal matters. IMF observation will get re-elected. Draghi threatens to terminate actions in non-compliance.

Unlimited purchases of 1 to 3 years.

ECB is no longer senior. ECB expects the same Pari Pasu treatment.

Sterilization: The liquidity created through outright transactions will be sterilized.

Transparency: Purchases to be revealed on a weekly and monthly basis.

I find this basically offensive, but Spain, Italy and the others had to know where a currency union would lead. If they couldn't print their own money, sooner or later they would have to beg the printer if they got into trouble. And so now we're seeing the loss of European sovereignty

... except when pointing out that Republicans in 1940 campaigned on the premise that Hitler's Germany could never be beaten, and thus President Roosevelt was wasting his time and precious American money trying to aid Great Britain.

Alot of people forget that into the late thirties, even Jolly St Winston seemed to be publicly more concerned about "the scourge of bolshevism" and the "bulwark" against the S.U that the vile Hitler represented, than they were about the Nazi threat..

Point being that the pre-WWII communist-threat meme, with it's concomitant enemy-of-my-enemy thinking, had become engrained deeply in many quarters pre-1940.

... to be publicly more concerned about 'the scourge of bolshevism' and the 'bulwark' against the S.U that the vile Hitler represented" in the late 1930s, then why would he have ever offered the following remarks in the House of Commons on March 24, 1938:

"I was very glad to hear the Prime Minister [Neville Chamberlain] reaffirm in such direct terms our arrangements for mutual defence with the French Republic. Evidently they amount to a defensive alliance. Why not say so? Why not make it effective by a military convention of the most detailed character? Are we, once again, to have all the disadvantages of an alliance without its advantages, and to have commitments without full security? Great Britain and France have to stand together for mutual protection. Why should not the conditions be worked out precisely and the broad facts made public? Everyone knows, for instance, that our Air Force is tripled in deterrent effectiveness if it operates from French bases, and, as I pointed out in the House three weeks ago, the fact that an attack upon this country would bring the attacker into conflict with the French Army is another great security to us here. We are obliged in return to go to the aid of France, and hitherto we have always been better than our word.

"Here, then, is the great security for the two countries. Do not conceal it. Proclaim it, implement it, work it out in thorough detail. Treat the defensive problems of the two countries as if they were one. Then you will have a real deterrent against unprovoked aggression, and if the deterrent fails to deter, you will have a highly organized method of coping with the aggressor. The present rulers of Germany will hesitate long before they attack the British Empire and the French Republic if those are woven together for defence purposes into one very powerful unit. Having gone so far, there is no safe halting-place short of an open defensive alliance with France, not with loose obligations, but with defined obligations on both sides and complete inter-staff arrangements. Even an isolationist would, I think, go so far as to say, 'If we have to mix ourselves up with the Continent, let us, at any rate, get the maximum of safety from our commitments.'" (Emphasis is mine.)

That certainly doesn't sound to me like Churchill was thinking that Nazi Germany was a bulwark against the Bolshevik peril in the late 1930s.

If you want to hunt a little harder, you can find plenty of the Churchill-myth-busting "bulwark against" statements I was referring to. Then you can print them all out in full, if you have the notion, Sir Donald.

Churchill was a red-baiting, inside trading, African and Indian village bombing imperialist -- along with being the revisionist, Dickensian Dutch Uncle, who delivered witty drunken bon mots and gave moving speeches during WWII.

mentioned by someone on another thread that the threat of rain tonight at 10:00 is 0%, the chance of rain at 7:00pm when everyone would have already been in the stadium is 80%

Excellent move getting inside tonight.

On a programming note, Gabby Giffords is expected at the convention tonight. Rumor is she will lead the opening Pledge of Allegiance.

No set schedule has been released yet, with a big hole between 6 and 10 which I never see as a good thing. It's the first time they haven't had the tentative schedule nailed down. Either that or they are planning surprises which also isn't a good thing (eg.. Clint).

Although no official release, Rachel Maddow describes the speaker schedule as "packed from the get-go"

schedules are good to know. Last night was a frantic clicker event with 3 important baseball games, Roger Federer at the US Open, football, antique auto auctions and the Big Dog. J is correct in saying watch it on C span but with quick check backs on Rachel. Tonight should be easier but more important. Anne you are of course correct in saying Clinton had nothing to do with the stock market today, bit if felt good thinking that.

at Baldwin being moved from primetime back to too-soon-to-be-watched-in-a-lot-of-Wisconsin, where they're still heading home from work at 5:30, picking up the kids, making dinner, etc. -- if, so we are told, it matters to get national teevee time at a convention, at least in primetime.

(Baldwin had been scheduled, for weeks, to kick off primetime at 7 p.m. CDT.)

The national Dems must have decided that it's okay to lose that seat and have two GOP Senators from Wisconsin. And no one openly LGBT in Congress?